The life of Rachel Maddow: How a Rhodes scholar and AIDS activist became America’s most unlikely cable television host

Rachel Maddow never set out to be a television news host. Friends thought she’d be a professor or an activist.

After studying at Stanford and Oxford, she got her start as a news announcer for a local Massachusetts radio station. She went on to be a radio host on Air America, before becoming a regular political commentator on MSNBC and CNN.

Since 2008, she’s hosted „The Rachel Maddow Show.“ She’s the first openly gay host of a primetime news program in the US.

She’s a new type of host, forgoing confrontational attack-style interviews for deep-dive monologues on whatever news item she thinks is worth analyzing.

Maddow is known for being extremely intelligent — she earned a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and it’s obvious in her lengthy, well-researched monologues that she opens her show with every day. She’s also more civil than some of her peers. She’s chided Pat Buchanan for telling another commentator to „shut up,“ and she refuses to act as a referee while guests fight, unlike on her competitor’s shows.

Maddow did not come straight to journalism. Friends thought she’d be a professor or an activist. But after deciding that she liked explaining things to people on a local radio station, it was only a matter of time. She went from that radio station to a bigger radio station, to television, to the face of MSNBC.

As Ben Wallace-Wells put it for Rolling Stone: „What Maddow is trying to build is a different channel for liberal anger, an outsider’s channel, one that steers the viewer’s attention away from the theater of politics and toward the exercise of power, which is to say toward policy.“

Here’s her life so far.

The life of Rachel Maddow: How a Rhodes scholar and AIDS activist became America’s most unlikely cable television host slides

The life of Rachel Maddow: How a Rhodes scholar and AIDS activist became America’s most unlikely cable television host slides

Rachel Maddow was born on April 1, 1973.

She grew up in a centrist house in Castro Valley, east of San Francisco — Maddow later described it as a „middle-class, suburban upbringing.“ Both her parents, Bob and Elaine, were Democrats, but they voted for President Ronald Reagan.

She went to Castro Valley High School.

In high school, she was athletic. She was particularly good at swimming, basketball, and volleyball. But when she injured her shoulder in her final year, she had to decide whether to carry on as an athlete, which meant getting surgery and delaying college, or to push on. She pushed on.

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In 1990, when she was 17, she enrolled at Stanford University to study public policy.

Roger Noll, Stanford’s director of public policy at the time, said Maddow was the sort of brilliant student who appeared only every few years. Her professor Debra Satz often showed her students Maddow’s undergraduate thesis on changing perceptions of AIDS.

Early on as a freshman, Maddow came out in an open letter she stuck up in bathroom stalls in her dormitory. She said she wrote the letter so that anyone who was homophobic would have a chance to be open about how they felt, and she could face any hostility head on.

The university’s newspaper, The Stanford Daily, published a story about it and described her as was one of two openly gay freshmen. When a reporter later asked whether the other person was her girlfriend, she said, „Funnily enough, only one other person was out, and she was not one of the many girls I was sleeping with.“

As Jill McDonough, a college friend of Maddow’s, told Rolling Stone: „No one at Stanford was saying they were gay — there were no other out lesbians — and she saw that it was a lie. The choice was, ‚I’m not going to be a hypocrite. I’m going to have courage.’“

A clipping of that article was mailed to her parents, which was how they found out she was gay. They didn’t take it well right away.

Ethics in Society / Youtube

For a year after college, she worked as a prison AIDS activist with Act Up and the AIDS Legal Referral Panel in San Francisco.

„We were taking this overwhelming, maddening, depressing, very sad thing that my community and my city were going through and figuring out what pieces of it we could bite off and fix, finding winnable fights in something that felt like a morass and was terrible,“ she told The New Yorker.

In 1995, Maddow moved to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar — she was the first openly gay women to do so. She studied AIDS in prisons for her doctorate.

Despite her scholarships and undergraduate success, she felt out of place and put her studies on hold. She moved to London and worked for an organization called AIDS Treatment Project.

After several stops, she ended up finishing her doctorate, on AIDS health care outcomes in prisons, in western Massachusetts. She told The Nation she wanted to live somewhere where’d she be unhappy.

„And I have no interest in New England, hate winter, don’t like the country, not fond of animals,“ she said.

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Maddow was friends with Cory Booker at Stanford and Oxford.

Booker, now a New Jersey senator, said that while he was surprised she went the way she did, she was always about making a contribution.

„She wasn’t just about giving commentary; she was an activist,“ he told New York Magazine in 2008. „She wanted to change the world.“

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After getting her Ph.D., she continued working as an activist. But to pay the bills, because she wasn't "a trust-fund kid," she delivered packages, did yard work, and cleaned out buckets at a coffee-bean factory.

In 2004, Maddow landed a job cohosting a program on Air America called "Unfiltered," with Chuck D and Lizz Winstead.

While the new radio station hoped to profit from well-known names, it was those with radio experience, like Maddow, who thrived. It was on the radio that she established herself as a „smiling but obstinate liberal.“

She was invited on Fox News only once, when Madonna and Britney Spears kissed.

In January 2008, she became a political analyst at MSNBC.

She was brought on as a left-wing commentator — but she told The New Yorker that though she’s a liberal, she doesn’t have strong feelings against the Republican Party. She’s interested in the sociology of the political styles, especially the „arcane“ style of conservatives.

Virginia Sherwood / NBC NewsWire / Getty

In 2008, "The Rachel Maddow Show" was launched.

It was a milestone. She’s the first openly gay woman to host prime-time news in the US. In her first month, she beat Larry King in ratings, which was unheard of for MSNBC.

And the actual show is shot differently from other talk shows. Typically, Maddow sits to the side, whereas other cable shows tend to focus on the face of the host. Other hosts focus on their own personality, while Maddow is about creating a narrative outside of her.

When Maddow's show began, MSNBC's president, Phil Griffin, said his channel had more "swagger" than it had ever had, because of Maddow.

On the Sunday night before her first show, at a party thrown for the staff, she told the group who had been working on "Verdict with Dan Abrams" and would now be working with her to forget everything they had ever learned.

At "The Rachel Maddow Show," her workday typically begins at 12:30 p.m.

She has said she tried writing in the morning, but it didn’t work for her.

„It’s not that I have anything so important going on in my life that I wouldn’t trade it to be better at my job, but it’s that you can only have your brain lit up for that long before it starts to break down and you stop making sense and stop being creative. What I don’t want to give up is the originality,“ she told The New Yorker.

She’s called herself the „hermit of Rockefeller Center,“ because unlike her host colleagues she’s not networking, she’s too busy writing or meeting with her team to work out what will be in their news agenda.

Jeffrey Ufberg / WireImage / Getty

Maddow is known for her lengthy and in-depth opening monologues.

They go on for a long time, up to 24 minutes, without interruption. She makes sure not to repeat stories that have already been in the news cycle, so that what viewers get is something else. And that’s important, because as Amanda Hess wrote for The New York Times Magazine, her viewers are already familiar with the news cycle. What they want from her is someone to take all of the facts and create a cohesive explanation about what is going on in the world.

In regards, to how she does this, The New Yorker’s Janet Malcolm wrote,“By reducing the story to its mythic fundamentals, Maddow creates the illusion of completeness that novels and short stories create. We feel that this is the story as we listen to and watch her tell it,“

Maddow also marks up the teleprompter with notes about when and how to physically act, like whether to laugh, frown, smile, move her hands, or pause for a moment.

Virginia Sherwood / NBC / NBCU Photo Bank / Getty

It also only takes her about 15 seconds to get dressed, and it's only from the waist up. She's worn her uniform of dark clothing, mostly blazers, for 11 years, and she does it so that the focus of her show is on content and not her outfit.

In 2012, she published her book "Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power," which was on The New York Times' bestseller list.

Maddow’s book is about the United States at war and how it’s changed.

The New York Times said the book, published by Crown, was a reminder that Maddow was a Rhodes scholar, but it also is filled with Maddow’s „cheerfully snarky voice.“

It’s not a piece of left-wing writing either — one of the book’s blurbs was written by Roger Ailes, the former chief of Fox News, who said the book was worth reading. „People who like Rachel will love the book,“ he wrote. „People who don’t will get angry, but aggressive debate is good for America.“

Of the writing itself, she told New York magazine: „Writing makes me want to blow my head off. I was very open with Crown about that. They assured me it wouldn’t happen.“

Slaven Vlasic / Getty

In 2012, Maddow clashed with the Republican strategist Alex Castellanos over whether women earn less than men.

Castellanos said that women didn’t make any less than men and kept interrupting Maddow. He finished by telling Maddow he loved how passionate she was.

„I wish you were as right about what you’re saying as you are passionate about it. I really do,“ he said.

Maddow told him that he was being condescending and clarified that her passion was based in fact.

It was instances like these that her producer Bill Wolff thought was what Maddow’s fans liked. He told Rolling Stone that they liked to see her defending rights: „voting rights, reproductive rights, women’s rights, really any kind of rights.“

William B. Plowman / NBC / NBC NewsWire / Getty

In 2012, Maddow also spoke openly for the first time about having depression.

„If I’m not depressed and I’m on and I can focus and I can think through something hard and without interruption and without existential emptiness that comes from depression, that gives me — not mania,“ she told Rolling Stone. „But I exalt. I exalt in not being depressed.“

Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images

In December 2015, Maddow focused in on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, while other national media outlets paid it little attention.

The watchdog organization Media Matters said Maddow had distinguished herself for her show’s in-depth coverage of the Flint water crisis, adding it looked into the issue more than all the other major television networks combined.

In 2016, Maddow's show brought in the most viewers in the 9 p.m. slot that she had ever had at MSNBC.

From 2017 on, after Trump became president and started dominating the news cycle, Maddow has drawn in more viewers. She's been seen as a rival to Fox News' Sean Hannity, although Hannity still gets more viewers.

According to The New York Times, Maddow’s fans are the „MSNBC Mom“ who have been radicalized by the election enough to begin consuming a lot more news.

Deciding how they should cover Trump wasn’t simple for Maddow and her news team. After some thought, they decided they would focus on what the White House did, not what it said. This means Trump is barely ever quoted on her show, instead, Maddow summarizes for him.

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In 2017, Maddow homed in on the possibility that President Donald Trump had collaborated with Russia.

From February 20 to March 31, 2017, she covered Russia more than any other single news item, according to The Intercept. During the six weeks, 53% of her broadcasts were about Russia.

With the intense focus on Russia, Maddow had less time to talk about other issues arising from the Trump administration.

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In March 2017, Maddow was criticized for a disappointing show about Trump's tax returns.

In late 2018, Maddow thrived as she explained the documents released by Robert Mueller, the special counsel leading the Russia investigation.

She briefly had the most viewers on cable news in 2018 — more than 3 million — before dropping down to fifth place in July 2019. But despite her popularity, she keeps most of her personal life from the media.

„The rest of me is my own,“ she told The New Yorker. „It’s not for everybody else. You sort of pick a slice of your life that you’re going to share as your non-TV persona and you give that to people — and they find it more or less interesting.“

Charles Sykes / AP

To help with the privacy, she and Mikula escape from their apartment in New York to their farmhouse in western Massachusetts on the weekends.

They’ve said they love the house, which was built before the Civil War, but that one issue was a bathroom at the top of a very steep staircase. So they built an outhouse, which also has a television that Maddow can watch football on, with the volume way up.

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In 2019, One America News Network sued Maddow for $10 million after she called it "paid Russian propaganda."

On her show, Maddow spoke about how an employee of One America News also worked for the news agency Sputnik, which has ties to the Russia government.

In September 2019, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for Trump's impeachment, Maddow's ratings rose again, this time to 3.3 million viewers.

In October 2019, Maddow published her second book called "Blowout." It's about the relationship between politics and the oil and gas industry.

A number of topics are covered by Maddow, including enviromental issues and disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and fracking in Oklahoma. But it also looks at Russian interference in the 2016 US election. The theme of the book, Maddow says, is that „it all ties.“

Nathan Congleton / NBC / NBCU Photo Bank / Getty

Despite her success, Maddow doesn't take being the face of MSNBC for granted.

She still worries about whether „being a pundit is a worthwhile thing to be,“ she told New York magazine. But she said she thinks it’s a good thing to be an outsider — a pattern of hers all her life.

„Yeah, I’m the unlikely cable news host,“ she told the magazine. „But before that I was the unlikely Rhodes scholar. And before that I was the unlikely kid who got into Stanford. And then I was the unlikely lifeguard. You can always cast yourself as unlikely when you’re fundamentally alienated in your worldview. It’s a healthy approach for a commentator.“